Whole Revenue Strategy

Alicia

Alicia, we’re going to call her Alicia to protect the innocent, is a brilliant CEO & founder. Emily & I met her 18 months ago when she was seeking a coach/ advisor. Her team love her, clients love her, prospects love her. Even investors seem to warm to her. She has more than 100 clients, she’s not far off clearing $10M ARR, but growth has slowed. NRR is weak, and it’s proving hard to break out of their domestic market.

She and her leadership team are smart and have a number of exciting strategic initiatives they have begun. They have a chance to build a marketplace which will give them a significant competitive moat. They have begun tentatively to explore overseas clients, and have signed the first few. They are also attempting to move upward into enterprise which they hope will increase ARPA & LTV. On top of this, they have several new product ideas which they believe can really set them apart from the competition & add even greater value to existing clients. Meanwhile they see a huge opportunity in a PLG motion in the SMB segment.

Sitting up in bed at night, Alicia was frustrated. More than frustrated. She had that gnawing anxious sensation in the pit of her stomach. They would need to start a fund raise process in less than a year. With her contacts, that wouldn’t have been impossible in the pre-Covid era. But today with NRR below 100%, growth dipping to 30% and no meaningful international expansion, she was less sure. Maybe she should bite the bullet & hire a top tier CRO? Or maybe a promising VP Sales? Or maybe plug that investment into improving the stickability of the product? Maybe these are not the kind of questions I should be asking myself after midnight, she concluded. But she struggled to get to sleep again that night.

The following afternoon Alicia gathered the leadership team together. It was in the gym that morning that she had remembered a conversation she had held with a potential coach a few months back. Whilst she had approached him for coaching, he had mentioned CEOs & Founders often benefitted from a deep-dive into the fundamentals of Revenue Strategy rather than just 121 coaching. As the leadership team discussed this idea it became clear that what was bothering her, was also bothering them. So many ideas, so little time. Such a great product, insufficient traction. And customers who just didn’t quite regard them as mission critical.

Emily & I spent a year with Alicia’s business, and continue to work as coach/ advisors with them even now. I spoke to her a few weeks ago for an update. In the end they had decided that the great ideas they were pursuing were just too much. Instead, they zoomed in on just one initiative and aligned the team so that everyone knew exactly what they were doing. Consequently, CAC is down dramatically, Churn is down, Sales Velocity is through the roof. The whole team is focussed on just a handful of objectives, and the team are exceeding them. Meanwhile ICP is tighter than ever, ARPA is up, and they now have a structured launch plan for international growth. NRR isn’t quite there yet, but the early indicators are that it will be. 

Lessons

We have worked with more than 100 startups & scaleups, including Alicia’s, over the last 4 years. These are the 3 core lessons we have learned:

1. Founders are brave. But there is so much they don’t know. There are no second chances, and the risk of failure keeps them awake at night. 97% of start-ups fail & they cannot risk being one of them.
2. Numbers are frequently good, but are they great? The product frequently scratches an itch, but is it great? The GTM frequently works, but is it great? In this new economic climate, getting funded is difficult. If you can’t answer, “great”, to each of these questions, you risk running out of runway. 
3. In theory the answer is to hire a great revenue leader. But great revenue leaders are rare. And if you can find one, they’re expensive. They’re also hard to identify - naturally they tend to present well in interviews. So how do you find revenue leadership you can trust your life’s work with? Most revenue leaders have insufficient experience to truly drive a successful revenue strategy meaning that, fatally, they will lose time, money & traction.

That is why we are launching Revelesco this week.

Revelesco works with CEOs & leadership teams to implement the number one priority: strategic frameworks for criticality, for rarity, for repeatability & ultimately for the one KPI to rule them all: sustainable recurring revenue. 

There is no blueprint to avoiding failure, and no one size fits all answer. We have learnt that there are 3 fundamentals to get right:

1. Be framework driven. The moment leadership teams hit upon a pattern: codify it, experiment with it, improve it, make it repeatable.
2. Deploy elite expertise. Why entrust your life’s work to someone who’s only done it once before? Don’t be that person who builds their new home themselves to keep the cost down. That’s trusting to luck, and it only works occasionally.
3. Be outcome propelled. So often leaders solve symptoms. Our proposals aren’t converting? Let’s tweak them. Our outbound is struggling? Let’s hire new SDRs. Our sales are below quota? Let’s fire the sales leaders. This is the SaaS equivalent of taking codeine for your headache. It will work for a few hours, but you’ll have another migraine next week. To be outcome propelled means to focus on the fundamentals. Your proposals aren’t converting? Instead let’s dig in on ICP, on mission criticality, on narrative; on the fundamentals. 

Revelesco

Emily & I have built Revelesco to deliver these three fundamentals for as many startups & scaleups as we can. We intend to be the consultant physician, not the codeine. 

And that’s where our own challenge arose. Everyone knows us as coaches. Between us, we are currently coaching more than 50 CEOs, CROs & revenue leaders. We love doing that, and will continue to do so, but we rarely got approached for revenue strategy. We had an issue with our own fundamental - the narrative.

The frustrating thing was, each time we spoke to a CEO we shared that we could work on Whole Revenue Strategy projects, and some of those CEOs jumped at the chance, including Alicia. The results of those projects have been transformational. You can hear Patrick O’Connor, CEO of Gatekeeper, talking below about the extraordinary outcomes of working with us. Principal amongst them being a huge investment from Vista Private Equity, one of the most influential PE investors in the world in our space. 

Patrick O'Connor, CEO Gatekeeper, for Revelesco

So what does Revelesco do?

We deliver Whole Revenue Strategy for B2B SaaS businesses between late stage seed & Series C. Core to this is the Revenue Surgery. Every 2 weeks the Revelesco team meet to discuss our clients toughest challenges. We call this the Revenue Surgery. The Surgery was inspired by a round table of neurologists Pete watched discussing his daughter’s puzzling ill health. He observed how true experts (as famously noted by Dunning & Kruger) have no problem admitting when they don’t know the answer, but have frameworks & methodologies that allow them to explore the true nature of a challenge to reach the best possible diagnosis.

An Elite Team

The Revelesco team tear down your toughest challenges, allowing you to benefit from their combined 100+ years of SaaS experience.

Who’s on this elite team? Eight revenue specialists each with a different core expertise: 

• MARKETING: Karen Steele reported to Steve Jobs at Apple, and has since run marketing & GTM for Marketo, LeanData & a host of who’s who across Silicon Valley.
• CUSTOMER: Erin Stavi runs the globally respected CS courses at Sales Impact Academy, drawing on her experiences at Signals Analytics & Wunderkind as a world class Customer Strategist.
• LEADERSHIP: Susanne Jacobs is on the Trust Across America top 100 list of the most respected leadership thinkers in the world. Her book, Drivers, is indispensable.
• REV OPS: Melissa McCready is the President of the Growth Ops Community and a world renowned Rev Ops leader who has consulted at Adobe, Microsoft, GE, Lacework, and Cylance which was acquired for $1.4B
• COMMS: Ben Rosner has just come back from Israel where he was called up to run Communications for the Israel Defense Forces. He cut his teeth at Finsbury and is in demand all over the world as a shaper of narrative.
• SALES: Ines Cid has spent the last several years as part of the leadership team that took Houzz from zero to $24M ARR and previously ran enablement at Yelp.
• And of course Emily Assender & I.

The Surgery is supplemented by 4 of the most sought after SaaS advisors in the world:

• TECH: Klaas Ardinois - An incredible knack for articulating complex tech thinking to CEOs & founders. 
• HIRING: Michelle Milbourn - Probably the best regarded SaaS headhunter in Europe
• FUNDING: Paul Fifield - 3 extraordinary founder journeys & over $100M raised. Now at Episode 1 & Bessemer.
• FINANCE: Jean Paul Alves - 10 acquisitions, 2 IPOs, multiple turnarounds, all as CFO.

Despite launching today, we already have our first clients. Let us know if you would like to discuss Whole Revenue Strategy, in the meantime discover more at our new website here.

Thanks, Pete & Emily